Organizational inertia generally falls into one of three categories: the inertia of routine, cultural inertia, and inertia by proxy.

good strategy works by harnessing power and applying it where it will have the greatest effect.

Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.

do a review of who your buyers are, who you compete with, and what opportunities exist. It’s normally a good idea to look very closely at what is changing in your business, where you might get a jump on the competition.

Bad strategy is long on goals and short on policy or action. It assumes that goals are all you need. It puts forward strategic objectives that are incoherent and, sometimes, totally impracticable. It uses high-sounding words and phrases to hide these failings.

In our longing for immortality, we ask that these strategic upstarts extend their success forever—the aging businessperson’s quixotic search for sustained competitive advantage. But the incumbent laxity and inertia that gave these upstarts their openings applies to them as well. In time, most will loosen their tight integration and begin to rely mo

As we have seen through the examples of U.S. national security strategy, Arthur Andersen’s presentation, International Harvester, Chad Logan, and the LAUSD, bad strategy is vacuous and superficial, has internal contradictions, and doesn’t define or address the problem. Bad strategy generates a feeling of dull annoyance when you have to listen to it

A system has a chain-link logic when its performance is limited by its weakest subunit, or “link.” When there is a weak link, a chain is not made stronger by strengthening the other links.

An economist would tell her that she should take actions that maximize profit, a technically correct but useless piece of advice. In the economics textbook it is simple: choose the rate of output Q that provides the biggest gap between revenue and cost. In the real world, however, “maximize profit” is not a helpful prescription, because the challen